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Almost Famous
The movie Almost Famous resonates with me because it captures something about the 1960’s Rock music scene that’s close to my experience of the times. In particular the rather tame analog marketing used to sell music in the 60’s has blossomed into the digital online hype of today. The aim was the same then as now. Find the right product; create the right pitch, step on the marketing elevator and ride to the top. Simple or so it seems.
Posting My Work
Here is where marketing gets personal. About three years ago I got interested in motion graphics as a way to make slideshows of my photos. Since then I’ve made more than thirty short videos. Most are posted on YouTube where they failed to reach an audience. Not much of a surprise. All combined they have less than a thousand views.
Finding Pinterest
In the middle of 2019 I discovered Pinterest. As a photographer the visual content there is very appealing. It didn’t take long to create several collections of photographs which generate a few hundred to a few thousand impressions a week.
Pinterest is an odd duck when it comes to standard content format which is vertical rather than horizontal. This is perfect for mobile users who don’t want to rotate their phones. Original content not produced in vertical format pretty much gets ignored.
When I posted links to some of my HD YouTube videos they got 40-50 views each. After reworking them from HD 1920×1080 to 1080×1920 and posting directly on Pinterest they immediately began getting multiple thousands of impressions.
Finding Success and Failure
On Christmas Eve I posted a 30 second animated New Years video which immediately took off. Within three weeks it had more than 150K impressions, 41K video views and hundreds of web site link clicks. I was absolutely shocked. Even after New Years it kept getting one or two thousand impressions a day.
That’s when I decided to post another video for Chinese New Year but it had a flaw so I deleted it. Unfortunately I actually deleted the wrong New Years video and lost my big success. In a panic I re-posted but the deed was done.
Well at least I was Almost Famous. Better luck next time.
